I've been using cruft and cookiecutter to allow users to get default configuration files. From time to time those files are changing and I want the users to run cruft upgrade. But in order to do so I want to disable them from editing those files so the upgrade process would be clean and the files would include only what I want.
Is there an existing tool that does that? maybe locks the files for future editing?
Thanks !
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I finally managed to get my application updating through installshield LE, without the user having to uninstall manually first, what I am now wondering is:
Can I get the installer to use the application settings from the previous install, so the users saved settings don't change, causing the user to enter their settings every time there is an update. But at the same time, add any new settings to the config file.
Is there anyway to get the installer to not update certain files, for example, the database file is held in a folder called 'db' inside the program files directory, I obviously don't want the users database getting overwritten with a blank one.
Thank you.
Im not sure what programming language you are writing in, but I had this concern with a C# application I wrote. I see 2 easy ways of doing it:
1) With C# you can setup application setting variables that get written to an XML file in the users Application Data (on WinXP) directory. The nice thing about this is that writing to and reading from the settings file is really easy through the API:
To save and store a variable:
Properties.Settings.Default.UserName = UserName_txtbox.Text; // save contents of UserName_txtbox to UserName setting variable
Properties.Settings.Default.Save(); // write variable to file
To restore a variable:
UserName_txtbox.Text = Properties.Settings.Default.UserName; //load contents of UserName variable to UserName_txtbox
Because the file that contains these are not included in the installation directory of the application, they are preserved.
If you are using a different programming language, you can try to implement the same concept.
Create a settings file that your program updates externally from the install location. (Perhaps it can be in the install location. Im not sure how your installer "updates". Does it replace files or uninstall the old version and install the new version automatically? Play this this to find out...)
Your settings file can be a simple txt file, a bin file, an XML file, etc. Anything that you can read and parse easily. Then you can load settings from the file when the program loads and save settings to the file when the program exits.
I have what might be a simple question and might be....a more complex one. We are preparing to add NSIS to our software, that is, we want people who use our software to be able to create installers using NSIS, but through our software. (We'll be creating functions using NSIS, acknowledging NSIS, etc.) What I am trying to figure out before we get started is how many/what files our customers will be required to have on their hard drive for NSIS to work. So, we just need to know if nsis can be used standalone or if it requires the user to install it into program files, or if it requires a lot of different files in AppData - If we have to bundle a few .dlls, that's not a problem and is expected. Ultimately, if we end up having to bundle NSIS as well, that's fine - We just want to make sure it'll work on other people's computers without telling them to go download it.
MakeNSIS does not read/write from/to the registry or anywhere else and only needs a handful of files for minimal operation.
To build a simple installer you need:
NSIS\MakeNSIS.exe (Just calls Bin\MakeNSIS.exe)
NSIS\Bin\MakeNSIS.exe
NSIS\Stubs\* (If you are only going to use a specific compression mode you only need one, and the uninstaller file if you want uninstall capability)
If you want to use the Modern UI you need its header files, some files from Contrib (Graphics and UI) and system.dll and nsDialogs.dll from the plugin folder.
Everything else is optional but I would recommend that you also bundle:
NSIS\Include
NSIS\Plugins (You can remove stuff you will never need; dialer, splash etc)
NSIS\Contrib (Language files, graphics and UI)
You can find license information here.
You could also just ask the user to install it and enter the path to it in your setup program...
I would just include all of the files. (It's only 5MB or so) NSIS has a zip archive as well as exe installer that includes the necessary files. (Or just zip up the installed directory from exe installer).
From my experience, NSIS does not need to be installed to work. I run a fleet of build servers that build NSIS-based installers, and they each just have the files extracted in a directory. The installer is never run on them. This should mean there are no DLLs to register or things like that.
Just make sure you are following whatever their licensing terms are - I have not reviewed redistribution/bundling of their files in another product, since that is not something I do.
I forgot to check out a source code file before modifying it.
When I get last revision, Perforce overwrote that file, so my work is totally lost.
Is it possible to recover the file?
For future use, update your client workspace so that you specify "noallwrite, noclobber". If noclobber is set, Perforce will not overwrite your writable un-opened files: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/cmdref/client.html
Only if your editor or your operating system saved a copy or it's been modified long enough that it made its way to your backups. Perforce will not make copies of such files, it blindly assumes that you didn't lie and will always honestly tell it when you want to edit a file.
if you are using eclipse then its possible to retrieve the local version using Compare With -> Local history . It helped me.
This has happened to me recently. For some reason, after I "p4 sync"-ed my workspace, and do p4 resolve, I noticed that my changes to a file were missing. I'm not sure if my changes were not saved or I haven't checked out the file. But I really remembered that my changes were saved. :(
I have been using Visual Studio for development and it doesn't have local history unlike in Eclipse. Luckily, that file is a javascript file and I have been testing my application in Internet Explorer. Since IE does some caching on some internet data like js files, what I did is to check the directory where it saves temporarily files (Internet Options -> Browser history settings ) there you'll see different versions of the files saved. I did recover my files! It was really just luck!
After that incident, I installed a plugin for visual studio for storing local history of files everytime it's being saved. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/226c2108-9da9-407d-b90d-9783040d27b8
Best thing to avoid these cases is to:
branch out your files first into a separate devline during development and submit every milestones you accomplished
incrementally. In this way you'll always have versions of important
changes you do during development. After this you could
integrate it back to the parent branch/mainline.
http://answers.perforce.com/articles/KB_Article/Branching-Codelines-and-Merging-Changes
Hope this helps!
If you fired the following command (which is a FORCE sync option), only then will Perforce update ALL your files.. including ones which are WRITABLE. The only exception is that any file that you have OPENED in perforce will not be overwritten. So if your file was made WRITABLE using OS command, and not using p4 open.. they will get overwritten by p4 sync -f.
p4 sync -f
The other possibility is that you did p4 sync, and still perforce overwrote your writable files (which were not opened using p4) because your workspace settings don't have noallwrite, noclobber specified. Usually by default, these settings are already specified, so that Perforce doesn't clobber writable files.
What files can be safely removed from CDT project and workspace before archiving or saving in a source control system?
Having MSVC experience, I tried to remove Debug and Release directories, this was really bad idea :(
Are you using an Eclipse plug-in for your version control system of choice? They seem to take care of everything (at least in my experience with the CVS and Mercurial plugins). If not, you'll need to tell Eclipse to refresh pretty much your whole project whenever you've interacted with version control.
The contents of the Debug and Release directories should all be autogenerated. If they're not, something's wrong.
Rather than what you can delete, turn it around and consider what you need to keep:
.project, .cproject and (if it exists) .settings
Your source directories
Your include directories
Any other human-created files at the top level e.g. Changelog, documentation
It may also be worthwhile looking inside the .metadata directory in your workspace root; for example, any launch configurations you have created are stored by default in .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.debug.core/.launches/ . (Although I have seen them inside project directories from time to time.)
CruiseControl.NET service needs to be restarted to pick up changes in the projects configuration files.
I find this very annoying, not sure if it's a bug or it's the way it works.
Is there any way to overcome this issue in people's experience?
If your projects are separated in a different file from ccnet.config, then you need to restart the service unless you touch the actual ccnet.config.
We use ENTITY with SYSTEM file reference in ccnet.config for our projects, so we're in the same boat. I'm happy to pay the price for easier project maintenance, as it's easy to script a restart:
net stop CCService
net start CCService
IISRESET
If you wanted to completely automate this, and had your projects under source control, then you could trigger an update and restart whenever your project files are touched.
There was a bug in CC.Net prior to 1.4.4 if you were using a pre-processor include it did not reload the configuration when an included ccnet.config file was modified.
That was a bug that I reported and it is fixed in CC.Net 1.4.4 and greater.
Also, keep in mind that if a build is running and there is a change to the configuration it will not take place until that build is in an idle state.
How are you updating your config files? By hand? Mine always recognizes and adjusts. Is your config file in source control and designed to pull it down and replace the file? This for me requires a kick. How I ended up fixing it was have my project pull it down to a seperate folder. THen I call ccnet.exe -validate on it to make sure it is well formed, then I copy it over ontop of the current config file. CC.NET recognizes the changes and loads in the new config
Exceptions: If cc.net is currently running a project, it will not recognize the changes till that project has completed.
If your ccnet.config has errors, it will not ever recognize the changes and keep running the old version it has stored in memory. (However when CC.NET does restart it will try to parse the error filled config and choke.
Hope this helps!!
Do you mean you are using linked files, that is the ccnet.config file has links to the independent project files.
If so then they are not picked up, it's mentioned in the documentation that it doesn't watch the sub-files.
Internally we have modified our CruiseControl.net so that our ccnet.config is optionally a directory - and we can drop shortcuts to our project config files into that directory. We put watches on the directory, the files or shortcuts in the directory and all of the targets of the shortcuts. That means we have our project config files in ClearCase and just drop a shortcut into the ccnet.config directory.
I've just spent half a day or so moving from 1.2 to 1.4.2 dropping our changes into the new version for our internal use. We don't own our code, our client does and so it has to stay internal :(
I have never experienced this. Whenever I change the configuration files, the CruiseControl.NET service seems to automatically re-read them.
I'm using Version 1.3 of CC.NET.
Update:
In the service's config file (ccservice.exe.config), there is a setting to enable/disable watching the ccnet.config file for changes:
<add key="WatchConfigFile" value="true"/>
Make sure this is set to true.